By Megan Montemarano
As 2016 comes to a close, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on the past year, and the many outstanding accomplishments Sotheby’s International Realty® has achieved. From expanding global services to new marketing tools, resources, partnerships and more, here’s a glance back on the brand’s most notable highlights for the year—and oh, what a wonderful year it has been.
Recent Expansions:
All year long, our brand has continued to expand both domestically and internationally. Most recently, Sotheby’s International Realty was thrilled to announce its entrance into Chile, adding yet another country to its South American presence. An agreement was also signed with New Zealand Sotheby’s International Realty to expand the company’s operations into Fiji, which will further increase our global footprint. Here at home, we have seen an increased brand presence in Michigan, with the addition of the Van Horn team in Holland, Michigan, which will now operate as Beacon Sotheby’s International Realty.
New Marketing and Brand Resources:
Now offering an invitation to explore the world’s best addresses right on your own TV, the brand launched yet another pioneering tool in 2016—the Sotheby’s International Realty Apple TV app. Available on all 4th generation Apple TV devices, the app features nearly 50,000 properties currently represented by our brand across the globe, with opportunities to explore homes on a larger scale than ever before.
Our brand partnered with The Wall Street Journal Custom Studios to feature a new video series entitled “Houseguest.” This four-episode series follows influential individuals as they become a houseguest in a Sotheby’s International Realty-listed home, melding their lifestyle with the extraordinary accommodations of the featured residence. We are the first real estate partner to develop this type of custom content with The Wall Street Journal. Click here to watch the latest “Houseguest” episodes.
Also this year, our brand was acknowledged for its ground-breaking integration of 3D Tours with Virtual Reality capability. The property detail pages on sothebysrealty.com now support 3D Tours, providing consumers with the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in the properties for sale. The tours additionally include a Virtual Reality Tour, available on all compatible devices. Sotheby’s International Realty was even mentioned by Inman News in a recent article, which recognized the company as the leader of this new online property-search trend, beating Zillow and Realtor.com.
In an effort to expand the brand’s reach in China, a syndication partnership with Juwai.com was launched earlier this year. As one of China’s premier real estate portals, Juwai.com has over 2 million monthly visitors and more indexed pages than all other portals combined on Baidu – China’s largest search engine. All current and 
new residential sales listings are automatically served on Juwai.com’s search engine. Each property overview page has a contact request form for Juwai.com shoppers to request more information. Requests are sent directly to Juwai.com’s team of first responders, a Chinese-language team located in mainland China, so they can respond to consumer inquiries in real time. The team then transcribes the conversations into English language lead forms and forwards them to the agent.
Capitalizing on the auction house’s audience of highly qualified consumers, the Sotheby’s International Realty brand has introduced a new series of ads on the homepage of sothebys.com. Every month, over 2 million affluent, motivated buyers visit sothebys.com, looking for information on art, automobiles and other luxury items, thus offering a fantastic opportunity to showcase extraordinary Sotheby’s International Realty properties.
Auction Highlights:
Perhaps one of the most memorable auctions of 2016 was David Bowie’s private art collection. This past November, the legendary musician’s collection drew in bidders to a packed salesroom, achieving over $40 million in sales. To learn more about the results of this buzz-worthy auction, please click here.
There were plenty of other remarkable auction results throughout the year, including new artist records and all-time high sales in the category of vivid diamonds. Here’s a look at the top ten prices achieved at Sotheby’s auction for 2016.
